Learning from email

One of the things that I want to explore on this blog are the techniques that have been particularly successful in medical education and CME. In 2007, a study was published in Medical Education, that I find particularly interesting (Medical Education, 2007, 41(1):23-31.)

The paper looked at the effect of "spaced education" which has been a consistently strong way to deliver education and training. Spaced education is simply education that's delivered over time. Instead of an hour of straight learning, you might have 10 minutes of learning once a day for six days. Spaced education is powerful, results of studies over may decades have shown that spaced education is more efficient, and it's more effective than "massed" learning. It's perfect for the tools we have available today, such as email and mobile technology.

The authors of the study used a pretty simple intervention. Third year medical students, in a one week urology rotation, were sent 10 - 13 emails with multiple choice questions or simple cases related to their urology learning objectives. . They got the emails over a period of up to 11 months. At the end of the academic year, they took a test on the content.

The students who had received the spaced education did significantly better on the test, and the strongest effects were up to 11 months after the intervention.

I like this study and its simple design - it used a powerful, and tested, learning technique and paired it with a ubiquitous tool (email), to get a strong outcome. I think we're likely to see more spaced educational interventions in the future.